24. “Perspectives: The Pursuit of Happiness. Paul Staley
examines a key phrase from the Declaration of Independence” (KQED public radio,
July 4, 2013); commentary by PAUL STALEY
(MPP 1980); Listen to this Perspective

The reigning king in the
truck world is the Ford F-150, and it’s been that way for a couple of decades.
But staying on top is getting harder.

With new, tougher fuel
standards looming there is a lot of emphasis on efficiency and innovation. On
Wednesday, Ford is announcing its flagship truck is taking a step into the
alternative fuel world with a vehicle that can run on natural gas....

Compressed Natural Gas,
or CNG, is cheaper than petroleum, it emits less carbon dioxide and the U.S.
has a whole lot of it....

Environmentalists though
aren’t on board with using natural gas because of the controversial way much of
the gas is extracted — through hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”

Roland Hwang with the Natural Resources Defense Council says he’s
not opposed to the fuel, but he doesn’t like how the U.S. is getting it.

“When you look at that
F-150 or whatever vehicle in the showroom, you’re thinking about whether [it]
is a good choice for the environment,” Hwang
says. “You got to keep in mind and you got to ask the question [of] how this fuel
is being produced. Is it better or is it just different?” ...

Supervisor Katy Tang is
taking another crack at the brothels that operate as city-licensed massage
parlors, saying legislation she helped craft four years ago as a legislative
aide isn’t doing enough to stop prostitution and human trafficking.

Tang said the new
legislation seeks to go after brothel owners, not individual masseuses, by
stipulating that the owners must pay any fines, and requiring that the property
owners are also notified when a violation occurs. The legislation would also
require masseuses to wear a photo ID while they are working; in addition to
sexual acts, the proposal explicitly bans alcohol and drug use at massage
parlors....

Prostitution at massage
parlors has been an issue for years. Tang worked on previous legislation when
she was an aide to former Supervisor Carmen
Chu, who is now the city’s
assessor-recorder....

When QuintoyaSeawright’s 3-year-old daughter, Destiny, chipped a
baby tooth in November 2010, the young mother took her to the Small Smiles
clinic in Montgomery.
Quintoya, 25, would end up taking her daughter to the
clinic four times that month.

On the last visit on
Nov. 9, her daughter was strapped to a board for an hour while the dentist
struggled to place two stainless steel caps on baby teeth while her daughter
screamed and struggled, saying she could still feel it, the family said.

But without much money,
the young mother had to rely on Medicaid to pay for her daughter’s care. Small
Smiles specializes in treating children eligible for Medicaid....

The large dental chain
is owned by a private equity firm and is managed by Nashville-based CSHM LLC. A
report released by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee last week claims Small
Smiles and clinics like it are motivated by profit, often performing
unnecessary procedures, and should be removed from the Medicaid program....

Very little research has
been done on the practice of corporate dentistry, said Shelly Gehshan, director of children’s dental
policy at Pew Charitable Trust, a nonprofit research organization.

That makes it hard for
state regulators to know which companies are providing good care and which aren’t,
Gehshan
said.

Banning all corporate
dental practices may not be the best solution, she explained, as the need for a
sufficient workforce to care for low-income children is great....

It’s the lack of
transparency among some corporate dental chains, like refusing to let parents
stay with their children during procedures, that troubles Gehshan.

“I think that’s a
troubling sign. There’s no question about it,” Gehshan said, but she stressed
that in dental care overall there are very few quality measures and dentists
are almost never paid based upon quality of care.

“They just pay for
specific procedures, so with that framework you’ve got a risk of poor care or
abuse of a system, like a payment system like Medicaid, by anybody, really. By
chains, by private dentists, but at least private dentists have sort of a peer
system,” Gehshan
said. “Whereas with corporations, I’m not sure what the reporting mechanisms
are.”

What is needed, she
said, is more research into innovative models of dental care, like the research
being done by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization
that studies health and health care-related issues....

4. “Your
Call: How does Medi-Cal work?” (KALW Public Radio,
July 25, 2013); program featuring LAUREL
TANLUCIA (MPP 2005), and CARY SANDERS (MPP 2002); Listen to the program

--MaliheRazazan

On the next Your Call,
we’ll look at the program that serves over 8 million poor and disabled
Californians.Why does the state pay the
lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the nation?Will providers continue to serve Medi-Cal patients as rates are cut further?And how will the system handle an influx of
new patients as the Affordable Care Act goes into effect? ....

Senate Finance Committee
Chairman Max Baucus said Tuesday he has instructed his staff to explore ways
that Congress might assist the city of Detroit
in getting through the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history....

Until now, lawmakers,
the Obama Administration, Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and even the
city’s emergency financial officer, Kevyn Orr, have
discouraged talk of a federal bailout of the MotorCity,
which formally filed for Chapter 9 federal bankruptcy protection last
Thursday....

Currently, the city
receives just 6% of its $2.6 billion in annual revenue comes from the federal
government, according to Detroit’s
2013 budget. Most of that money is received in the form of community
development and community services block grants, transportation funds and other
assistance.

But maybe more can be
shaken loose. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a one-time
chairman of the Detroit City Council, said yesterday that he and others in Washington should be looking
closely “at every single federal program, where there are funds available for
various things—from removing blighted houses to transportation to brownfields to education grants, to everything else the
federal government is involved in.”

Tracy Gordon, a Brookings Institution fellow in state and local public
finance, also cautioned that even if the administration offered Detroit flexibility on
federal programs and mandates, technical assistance or even additional funds, “I
just wonder how much that helps in the grand scheme of things.”

“If the federal
government were to really step in and loan them money, that would be something
else,” she said. “But giving them more flexibility around the edges with
grants, I don’t think will make a big difference.” ...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)
— State officials are temporarily suspending 16 California alcohol and drug treatment
centers suspected of violating health care laws — from hiring people who were
convicted of abusing patients to bilking Medi-Cal for
services they never performed.

Department of Health Care Services Director Toby Douglas said
Thursday he is referring the centers to the state Department of Justice for
further investigation. Douglas oversees Medi-Cal,
the state’s Medicaid health insurance program for the poor.

“There have been reports
of abuse and fraud in the Drug Medi-Cal program and
we took action,” Douglas
said in a statement. “We are in the midst of a wide ranging statewide
investigation.”

The state issues about
1,000 licenses to provide treatment to Medi-Cal
patients for substance abuse and addiction. State officials began investigating
22 treatment centers and found 16 of them were suspected of various violations....

7. “Capitol Journal:
Different stripes, same drive; An encounter with
pitching great Warren Spahn in 1961 prompted a
reporter to cover politics instead of sports. But they’re not so different” (Los
Angeles Times, July 18, 2013); column citing RICK SIMPSON (MPP 1977).

By George Skelton

SACRAMENTO -- ... Politicians, jocks and
people who write about both types often share the same lingo: Home run. Strike
out. Slam dunk. Hail Mary.Horse
race.Playbook.

Political polling is
like a line score: Both keep track of the contest.

Opposition research and
scouting reports find vulnerabilities to exploit.

Modern congressional
gridlock resembles rugby, says [Bill Carrick, a Democratic consultant], who
played the sport in college. “Progress is one inch at a time.”

There’s also thrust and
parry, as in fencing.

Veteran Assembly education consultant Rick Simpson was a fencer in
college. “Thrust is when you’re trying to hit the other person,” he explains. “Parry
is when you’re trying to block with your sword.”

He cites an example during
this year’s legislative session. Gov. Jerry Brown thrust with his radical new
school funding formula. The Legislature parried to soften the blow to suburban
schools, represented by many lawmakers. “We blunted the force of his attack.” ...

MEXICO CITY -- President, Enrique Pena Nieto,
using the powers conferred upon him by Article 89 of the Mexican Constitution,
has named seven ambassadors and consuls to various missions abroad. The
appointments, which are now before the Senate, are: ...

Andres RoemerSlomianski, Consul General
in San Francisco, California. Roemer holds a law degree from the UNAM, an economics degree from
ITAM, a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in public policy from UC Berkeley,
and did postdoctoral studies in cultural codes and evolutionary psychology at
the UC Berkeley School of Law. Since 2007, he has been the president of PoderCivico and curator of the The City of Ideas Festival....

WASHINGTON
-- Republicans controlling a House committee moved Wednesday to eliminate
funding for a Clinton-era program that helps local governments hire police
officers, a step driven by deepening automatic spending cuts that official Washington appears
unable to head off.

The Community Oriented
Policing Services program, known as COPS, has been a resilient survivor of GOP
attacks dating back to the party’s takeover of Congress in 1995. The program,
slated to get $440 million in President Barack Obama’s budget, would instead
get “zeroed out” in a spending bill to fund the Justice Department for the
upcoming 2014 budget year.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The
University of California’s governing board plans to vote Wednesday on a new
student member who would be the first practicing Muslim to hold the post and
whose nomination is being vigorously opposed by some Jewish groups.

UC Berkeley senior SadiaSaifuddin was picked from a
field of 30 applicants to serve on the UC Board of Regents during the 2014-15
academic year. As student regent-designate, the
21-year-old Pakistani American would participate in meetings but wouldn’t be
able to cast votes during the school year that begins this fall.

The SimonWiesenthalCenter, StandWithUs,
conservative commentator David Horowitz and others have called on the board to
reject Saifuddin’s appointment, alleging that some of
her political activities as a student senator and member of the Muslim Students
Association at Berkeley make her unqualified to
represent the University
of California system’s
more than 222,000 students....

Jonathan Stein, a Berkeley law school graduate who recently completed a
one-year term as the UC student regent and was part of the five-member
committee that recommended Saifuddin, said her
critics have overlooked Saifuddin’s work to build
bridges, which included bringing Muslim and Jewish students together during the
divestment debate and founding the Berkeley
campus’ first interfaith worship space.

“The really negative
response that’s come, that has characterized Sadia as
extremist, intolerant, I guarantee that is coming from people who have never
met her in person,” Stein said. “She
is, in fact, an incredibly mature, thoughtful, tolerant person.” ...

... As the city faced
questions over its response to the vandals, the scars of the three nights were
visible downtown in a series of boarded-up businesses. Merchants and residents
— many of whom believe Zimmerman should have been convicted of murdering
unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin — tried to make sense
of what’s become a familiar narrative of Oakland protests: peaceful by day,
destructive by night.

Some of the masked
vandals seemed to care little about whom they targeted. One of Oakland’s most beloved nonprofit groups, Youth Radio, which for 20 years has
trained poor and at-risk young people to become journalists, had three front
windows destroyed.

“It hurts,” Executive Director Richard Raya said
Tuesday. “We moved down here five years ago to be part of Oakland’s rejuvenation and to have our
students be a part of this energy.”

Raya said no one was in the studio when the windows were smashed.
His students were out covering the impact of the Zimmerman verdict in Oakland’s neighborhoods.
He said the vandalism would not impact summer courses or the students’ outlook
on their location.

“The folks breaking the
windows are not representative of who we are or people we know in this
community,” Raya said. “It’s almost
a shame we have to take time to talk about what they’re trying to do. It
detracts from the larger issue that we’re all working on.”
...

[Richard Raya was also cited on the subject in The Oakland Tribune, July 17, 2013.]

U.S. lawmakers are fuming over the fact that
even as Shuanghui International’s bid to acquire the
pork processing giant Smithfield appears to be
moving ahead, it is doubtful that a U.S.
firm could make the same type of investment in China
because of the tight controls that Beijing
keeps over its market....

The proposed takeover of
Smithfield is
currently pending before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United
States (CFIUS), and is expected to go through. CFIUS reviews focus on national
security only, and do not deal with other issues....

The [Treasury] department
last week also responded to a formal letter from 15 committee members to
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew raising questions about the acquisition. In their
June 20 letter, the Agriculture Committee members had pressed Lew to include
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) in the CFIUS review, even though USDA and FDA do not normally participate
in such national security reviews.

However, the Treasury
response declines to comment on that specific point, or to provide any details
on how the CFIUS review is playing out. The July 9 response letter—which was signed
by Alastair Fitzpayne,
assistant secretary for legislative affairs—merely reiterates that CFIUS
reviews are confidential and that it cannot comment on them until after the
administrative review has concluded....

When community
stakeholders first proposed a regional transportation plan that reduced
driving, planning agencies thought we were crazy. They expected never-ending
growth in driving, ongoing freeway expansion, sprawling development and
pollution.

That was 15 years ago.
On Thursday, those same agencies expect to approve Plan Bay Area, a 25-year
transportation and land-use plan that would reduce driving by 9 percent per
person on average....

But there is still room
for improvement. Our organization, TransForm, and many allies proposed in the Environmental
Impact Report an “Environment, Equity, and Jobs” scenario, which rose above the
draft plan as the “environmentally superior alternative.” More than 45
community groups have rallied behind this scenario and ask that the final plan
incorporate its best elements.

A key change is to erase
the lingering fingerprints of the freeway-building era. After BART to San Jose, the most
expensive project in the plan commits more than $6 billion to hundreds of miles
of new express lanes. These would allow solo drivers to pay a toll to use the
carpool lanes and avoid traffic, but not a penny would be put toward
alternatives to driving.

Other regions have used
express lane revenues to fund vanpools, carpools, public transit and other
transportation choices. Instead of lagging behind, the Bay Area should be out
in front. We should create our express lanes using existing highway lanes
instead of spending 10 times more to build new lanes, and invest the revenues
in transportation choices. The result will save more time for all commuters.

The plan also
desperately needs stronger policies to prevent displacementof low-income residents. Regional officials should
prioritize funding for more affordable homes and local transit service with
funding from the state’s new cap-and-trade fund of revenues collected from
polluters....

Jeff Hobson is deputy director and ClarrissaCabansagan is transportation advocate at TransForm [founded and directed by Stuart Cohen], an
Oakland-based nonprofit working to create world-class public transportation and
walkable communities in the Bay Area and elsewhere in
California....

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)
— As California prepares to launch its health care exchange, consumer groups
are worried the uninsured could fall victim to fraud, identity theft or other
crimes at the hands of some of the very people who are supposed to help them
enroll....

The enrollment
counselors will play a critical role in Covered California’s public awareness campaign
because the state estimates 1 of every 2 people seeking to enroll will need help buying insurance. Those consumers may not
speak or read English, or they might not be familiar with how the federal law
will affect them.

Currently, Covered
California’s rules do not specify what offenses would disqualify an applicant
for a counseling position. Lucero said the exchange is still reviewing its
procedures and could follow other state employment guidelines....

Proponents of health
reform view the consumer assistance program as an opportunity to enroll
hard-to-reach residents, many of whom have just high school educations or less
or speak a language other than English at home.

“We don’t want
applicants from communities where the exchange really needs to reach out to
being sent away because they made a mistake in the past or bounced a rent check
or have maybe a minor drug offense,” said Cary
Sanders, policy analysis director at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network,
a multicultural health organization. “It doesn’t have a bearing on their
ability to provide the appropriate assistance to their communities.”

The fallout from the BayBridge
failed-rod fiasco has unmasked chaos and incompetence surrounding construction
of the new span.

For months now,
transportation officials have scrambled to explain why 32 critical connectors
corroded and then snapped when tension was applied, figure out a workaround,
and determine what should done with 2,210 similarly treated bolts....

Unfortunately,
subsequent actions indicate an insular culture persists, especially at the
state Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, and that officials
overseeing bridge construction may be destined to repeat the mistakes of the
past....

For example, Sacramento Bee investigative reporter
Charles Piller revealed in May that steel tendons
critical to the structural integrity of the roadway were discovered in 2006 to
have rusted. Ducts containing the tendons had been left unsealed, allowing
water to enter. Piller reported that Caltrans’
subsequent dismissal of the problem was based on faulty data.

At a meeting Wednesday,
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, a member of the Metropolitan
Transportation Commission, asked [Malcolm Dougherty, Caltrans’ director] to
prepare a response. It wasn’t the first time commissioners had asked.
Legislators have sought the same. But Dougherty has dragged his feet, saying
that the issue was resolved years ago.

Then there’s the
challenge of what to do about other bridge bolts like those that failed. The
three [Toll Bridge Program Oversight Committee] members insist the bridge can
be safely opened after installation of a bracket that will substitute for the
failed bolts. Fabrication of the bracket is not expected to be completed until
December. They say they can safely deal with other bolts later.

The question is how. The
three insist they know why the 32 bolts corroded and broke apart. Some
respected outside metallurgists disagree with their reasoning. Unfortunately,
Caltrans remains uninterested in their opinions and unwilling to subject its
work to outside metallurgical peer review.

Such an independent
back-check might have prevented the current crisis, and might avert another.

California’s groundbreaking efforts to
encourage homeowners and businesses to install rooftop solar panels were so
successful in 2012 that the program is now effectively winding down, according
to a new report.

A record 391 megawatts
of solar power were installed statewide in 2012, a growth of 26 percent from
2011, according to a report by the California Solar Initiative released
Wednesday.

“The program has made
solar affordable for ordinary Californians,” said Susannah Churchill of the San Francisco-based solar advocacy group Vote
Solar. “Solar is a classic California
success story.”

In January 2007, California launched an
unprecedented $3.3 billion effort to install 3,000 megawatts of new solar over
the next decade and transform the market for solar energy by reducing the cost
of solar-generating equipment.

The aim of the
incentives is to help solar achieve what’s known in the renewable energy
industry as “grid parity”—the long-awaited point at which solar can compete
with cheaper sources of electricity such as natural gas.

Since 2007, the average
total installed cost for residential solar systems has decreased 32 percent
from $8.77 per watt to $5.98 per watt. Those costs include labor and
permitting, as well as the panels themselves.

Coursera,
a provider of free online classes taught by university professors, said
Wednesday that it has raised $43 million in financing to double employees,
develop mobile applications and bolster global expansion....

The rise of online
educational offerings has become a point of contention in some parts of
academia. Earlier this year, University
of California President Mark Yudof
predicted that within five years, UC students will likely take 10 to 15 percent
of their courses over the Internet.

Yudof
said he planned to provide incentives for faculty to develop online courses to
ease overcrowding in the most popular freshman and sophomore courses, and that
UC is working to overcome technical difficulties preventing students from
taking online courses developed on campuses other than their own.

But UC Student Regent Jonathan Stein warned that students are concerned
that trading the benefits of campus and classroom for computerized education
would be a “degradation of the UC experience.” ...

18. “Is It Time to Give
Up on CNN?” (Gawker, July 10, 2013); commentary citing ROBERT ENTMAN (MPP 1980/PhD).

--Sid Bedingfield

For several days now,
CNN’s extensive coverage of the George Zimmerman trial has shouldered aside the
more important Egypt story
on the network’s U.S.
channel....

Can we all agree that responsible
news organizations should tread carefully when covering a story that evokes
such strong memories of our nation’s racial history? ...

And anyone with a
passing knowledge of that history understands how this case could tap into a
deep vein of suspicion and anger.

Given that fact, is this
the sort of trial that should receive the full-on Reality-TV show treatment?
Probably not....

Do their jobs well and
the producers of the Zimmerman-Martin mini-series could get an unfortunate
twofer—a ratings spike during the trial, and another ratings bump covering the
violence that follows. No one wants that to happen.

All of this reminds me
of a test that communications professor
Robert Entman proposed to determine whether a
news outlet was practicing ‘tabloid journalism.” Entman focused on motivation. If
the journalists made decisions based primarily on maximizing readers, ratings
and profits, it was a tabloid outlet. If those journalists granted more weight
to the public good, even at the risk of leaving some revenue on the table, it
was not.

CNN has always been
willing to chase a popular story, but it has also balanced those ratings grabs
with an equal sense of public service. The network spent enormous amonts of air time and money on important coverage that was
unlikely to draw a big audience (and we often had the ratings to prove it!).
Under the Entman
test, CNN never reached tabloid status in the past. And for the record, I don’t
think it has now either. But I wonder if the Zimmerman coverage marks a turning
point....

Kofi Bonner of Lennar Urban, developer of the delayed Hunters Point
Shipyard project, says the project has $77 million committed from 154 foreign
investors through the EB-5 program. (Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle 2010)

You’re a developer
looking for capital to fund a major project, but find traditional U.S.
sources, post-Great Recession, are still gun shy. Think EB-5....

Through EB-5, a U.S.
immigration program that essentially trades green cards for foreign private
investment, $87 million has been raised for the Hunters Point project and $40
million to convert the 1926 Renoir into a boutique hotel in the Mid-Market
area....

Under the 23-year-old
program, designed “to stimulate the U.S. economy through job creation
and capital investment,” foreign investors are required to come up with $1
million — $500,000 for an area with higher than average unemployment — that can
be tied to the creation of at least 10 full-time jobs within two years.

In return, the investor qualifies
for a green card and visas for his or her immediate family....

Prospects weren’t
looking too good for the long-delayed HuntersPoint-TreasureIsland project when the
$1.7 billion financing deal with the state-owned China Development Bank fell apart
in April.

However, Kofi Bonner,
regional vice president of Lennar Urban, with the help of Bay Area Regional Center, had been quietly rounding up private
foreign investors since 2011.

Last week, Bonner
disclosed that the project has $77 million committed from 154 mostly Chinese
investors, pending approval by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,
which along with the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees the EB-5
program.

At the same time, Bonner
announced that a “significant minority stake” in the Hunters Point development
had been purchased by TPG Credit, a Minneapolis
company with $2.3 billion in assets under management. Bonner would not disclose
the amount invested, but described TPG Credit as “a partner.”
...

Meanwhile, the Bay Area Regional Center, one of whose
principals and minority shareholders is former San Francisco mayor and Chronicle columnist
Willie Brown, is continuing to tap private foreign investors on behalf of
Lennar.

“What we hope to do is
continue to raise money as the project moves forward,” said the firm’s CEO, Ginny Fang. “We’re looking
at hundreds of millions of dollars in EB-5 financing.” ...

Fang, who formerly headed ChinaSF, the public-private agency that seeks out
Chinese companies and institutional investors, did not provide details of the
firm’s financial interest in the deals it puts together. Like other financial
firms, she said, Bay Area Regional Center charges fees and gets “some layer of
profit” from a completed project — which, in the Hunters Point case, is decades
away....

Lennar won’t be using
its EB-5 investment for a while. The $77 million sits in escrow while
immigration authorities check the investors’ backgrounds. “They’re slowly
wading through the final approval process,” said Fang. “The system is very backlogged.”

That does not dim her
enthusiasm about EB-5. “It’s a really interesting economic development program.
Well-established firms are learning how to use it. The potential job story is great,
and it works for investors.” ...

Property tax assessments
are roaring back this year in the wake of the real estate market’s strong
turnaround. Every Bay Area county is reporting strong growth in their assessed
rolls, meaning more cash in their coffers come tax time....

San Francisco, the only county in the state where
tax rolls never fell during the real estate downturn, had a 4.61 percent
increase this year. In addition to rising property values, the city’s building
boom plays a big role, said Assessor Carmen
Chu.

“We look as of Jan. 1
every year at the construction that has occurred and assign a value, even to
partially completed projects,” she said. “We are seeing a lot of construction
activity. They say San Francisco’s
new official bird is the crane — the construction crane.” ...

More
than $10,000 on the First Annual Baby Stroller Derby Days event in the Marina. An
additional $75,000 for a gun buy back program in the Mission. And $29,000 for “bedbug laundering
support” in District Six, which includes the
Tenderloin and South of Market.

Those are just some of
the ways that San Francisco’s
11 supervisors chose to spend the $1.25 million in discretionary funds that
they allocated themselves last year for the first time. And in the proposed
budget awaiting approval, supervisors will once again have $100,000 each — some
had more last year if they only had two legislative aides instead of three — to
dole out to the community as they see fit.

“The idea was we could
create district pots of money to address physical and other challenges that
exist in the district,” said Assessor-Recorder
Carmen Chu, who as a supervisor chaired the Budget and Finance Committee last year.
“Sometimes emergencies occur that you don’t know about ahead of time and need
to address.”

Supervisors are spending
much of the money on park improvements, as Chu chose to do with
$100,000 to rebuild Larsen Playground in the Sunset District....

“The supervisors could
have chosen for it to go elsewhere or to go for a different purpose but I would
imagine that most folks would prefer to address issues in the neighborhood,” Chu said....

National Public Radio
host Glynn Washington listened to every vocal inflection, pause and musical
note during a recent rehearsal session in a makeshift sound studio at a beat-up
industrial building in West Oakland....

It was fitting. His
weekly show is, after all, called “Snap Judgment.” ...

Stories are told with
musical scores tweaked for tone and emphasis. The content tends to challenge
traditional views on sexual roles, racial attitudes, and religious and social truths.“There is a real demand for this type of
story-telling, and I feel like we’re holding a tiger by the tail,” said
Washington, who lives in Oakland
with his wife and their two children....

Washington, who earned
undergraduate and law degrees from the University
of Michigan and moved to Oakland in 1999, was a
well-known figure even before he hit radio stardom.

He made a run for Oakland mayor in 2006, but
withdrew when Ron Dellums announced his candidacy.
His wife, Anne CampbellWashington, is Mayor Jean Quan’s
chief of staff, and was recently appointed to a vacant seat on the Oakland school board....

24. “Perspectives: The
Pursuit of Happiness. Paul Staley examines a key phrase from the Declaration of
Independence” (KQED public radio, July 4, 2013); commentary by PAUL STALEY (MPP 1980); Listen to this
Perspective

By PaulStaley

A few years ago I was in
a hotel in Berlin
that had placed a copy of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in every room. I
didn’t read all of it, but ever since then, when July 4th rolls around, I
remember that trip because Article 3 of the UN Declaration states, “everyone
has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

Those last three words
are jarring to American ears accustomed to the familiar cadence of our
Declaration of Independence. It’s like having the lyrics of a familiar song
changed. What happened to my pursuit of happiness?

The differences between
these two versions say so much. The U.N. document may appear to be setting the
bar a little lower, selecting essential rights from a list of our most basic
needs....

There is, as well, a
subtle but powerful distinction about the role of government. Security of
person, our Constitution’s Second Amendment notwithstanding, is shared
collectively; it is something that government provides. In our Declaration,
however, government has stepped back. It allows people the room to pursue what
they want....

It’s Independence Day,
which means celebrating our core values as a nation—freedom from tyranny,
constitutional democracy, prosperity. Which are also ‘brand values’ for the United States
as a global venture. We promote and sell America to
the world—with music and movies, technology, leadership in international
financial institutions such as the IMF and G-8....

“You’d have to say the
brand is getting stronger,” says Stan Collender, a political analyst at Qorvis
Communications in Washington,
D.C. “The U.S. logo is about as
strong as it’s been in the last 5-10 years.”

Collender says the U.S. is certainly doing better than its main
competition—Europe, with its persistent austerity, recession and high
unemployment; China,
with its banking troubles and real estate bubbles.

Collender says this country’s
single best brand ambassador is the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben
Bernanke.

“The U.S. Federal
Reserve—independent, less susceptible to politics—did a hell of a good job and
continues to do a good job. And there’s a certain confidence in the markets
because of it.”

But Collender says Brand USA has
one big stain on it: political paralysis on budgets and deficits. The sequester—across-the-board
formulaic federal budget cuts—going into effect early this year was one result.

“It’s a little bit like
all the officers of a corporation are still squabbling,” says Collender, “and
stockholders are wondering whether they’re ever going to be able to make
decisions.” ...

Now that it is over,
everyone can admit it — the Friday afternoon decision to allow same-sex
marriages took nearly everyone by surprise.

Some city and county
agencies got an e-mail around 2:45 p.m. from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals saying that it would have an announcement soon. But Matt Dorsey,
spokesman for the city attorney, said most thought the statement would simply
repeat that the stay would be lifted in 25 days.

“There was one lawyer in
our office who said, ‘This is it. Courts are closed back east and they are
going to push the train out of the station,’ “ Dorsey
said.

Chu already had a plan;
she just put it into action sooner than expected. City Hall stayed open until 8
p.m. on Friday (even with short notice, 55 couples were married the first day)
and opened on both Saturday and Sunday. Over three days, her office issued 563
marriage licenses....

OAKLAND,
Calif. (AP) — San FranciscoBay
area commuters entered another day without the region’s heavily used rail
system as hundreds of train workers demanding higher wages continue to strike.

California Highway
Patrol spokeswoman Sgt. Diana McDermott said it could have been worse.

Transit authorities have
made accommodations to help, including longer carpool lane hours, additional
ferries, and extra buses and bike shuttles over the BayBridge....

Stuart Cohen, executive director of TransForm,
a nonprofit organization focused on public transportation and walkable communities in the Bay Area, suggested employers
allow workers to telecommute.

“Truth is, on a nice
summer day, it’s good to telecommute,” he said.

“Hopefully this won’t go
too long. It if continues into a nonholiday week next
week, we’re going to find a lot of people settling into new patterns, finding
carpools,” he said. “I think this experimentation could settle in a bit, and if
it lasts long enough, I’d expect when BART service comes back ridership will be
down.” ...

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS
CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Obama and Democrats
warned of disaster repeatedly before this year’s $85 billion in automatic
across the board spending cuts began four months ago....

The justice department
avoided furloughing FBI agents and federal prison staff when it discovered $350
million in unspent cash from programs that either never started or ended under
budget. Homeland security sidestepped furloughing customs and border patrol and
coast guard personnel by not filling vacant jobs, cutting bonuses, and
postponing some maintenance programs.

MICHAEL LINDEN, CENTER FOR
AMERICAN PROGRESS: Those sorts of one-time fixes are going to go away over
time. And some of those predictions that we saw that haven’t come true yet are
still quite likely in the future....

Elliot Perry watches his moms, Sandy Stier
and Kris Perry, embrace after exchanging vows. State Attorney General Kamala
Harris performed the ceremony, the first at S.F.City Hall
after a court cleared the way. (Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle)

... Wedding bells: ... Once
the U.S. Court of Appeals lifted the stay late Friday afternoon and allowed
same-sex marriages to resume in California,
same-sex couples rushed to the clerk’s office and kept coming throughout what
was an extra special Pride weekend for some.

A total of 563 same-sex
marriage licenses were issued since Friday in San Francisco, the only county in the state
to stay open over the weekend for gay couples who couldn’t wait until Monday,
said Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu in
a statement.

And while few expected
same-sex marriages to resume so quickly after the Supreme Court’s Proposition 8
decision on Wednesday, the 60 volunteers the city had been training to record
and issue licenses and perform weddings still came through.

“I am deeply touched by
the outpouring of support from our city employees and volunteers who took the
time to be here at City Hall, working after hours and on their weekend, to
perform our collective duties — that of ensuring that loving same-sex couples
don’t have to wait to marry any longer,” Chu said.

Jun 27: U.S.
Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced H.R.2539, the Prioritizing
Energy Efficient Renewables (PEER) Act. The
legislation would permanently extend the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit
(PTC) for wind, geothermal, hydro, and marine power and eliminate the tax
credit for intangible drilling costs, the domestic manufacturing tax credit for
oil and gas, and the percentage depletion credit for oil and gas wells. The
legislation is revenue positive, as the approximately $1.6 billion cost of the
PTC last year is outweighed by the approximately $3.7 billion in annual costs
of the three oil and gas credits....

On June 28, when Nordex USA, Inc. announced that it will cease manufacturing
wind turbine housings at its factory in Jonesboro,
Arkansas, largely because of unpredictable U.S. policies, the U.S.
wind energy industry renewed its call for a predictable tax policy to keep U.S.
manufacturing jobs....

Rob Gramlich, Senior Vice President for
Public Policy of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said, “Wind
power has been good for Arkansas
consumers and businesses, and wind power could do a lot more for the state if
we had predictable national policies to create a stable business environment.
That starts by keeping the federal Production Tax Credit in place to allow wind
energy to scale up as rapidly as it can. Nordex said
uncertainty is one of the main reasons for their business decision to cease
building wind turbine nacelles in Jonesboro.
Arkansas has positioned itself to take
advantage of the wind industry’s growth in the region, which is providing
low-cost electricity in Arkansas
and exporting energy east. And consumers are saving, because wind power holds
down the overall cost of electricity on fixed-price contracts. But predictable
policies to create a stable business environment are critical, especially if we
want to maintain this new U.S.
manufacturing sector and tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. That will take
action by Congress.” ...

Most of the debate about
how the health law will change the individual market has centered on whether
consumers will experience “rate shock’ from higher premiums when key changes go
into effect next year. But there’s a flip side: new rules that broaden
benefits, prohibit discrimination against those with health issues and cap
consumers’ out-of-pocket costs, which can cut far deeper than premiums.

Currently, about one in
five plans sold to consumers makes them responsible for at least half their
medical costs after they’ve paid their premiums and met their deductibles,
according to an analysis of government data by U.S. News & World Report and
Kaiser Health News.c It could not be determined how
many consumers have such plans.c

Coverage under the
health law will still require cost-sharing, potentially running into thousands
of dollars. But those amounts will be clearly laid out—helping those who now “might
buy insurance that looks cheap, but when they get sick, they realize they didn’t
read all the fine print, and it doesn’t cover what they thought it did,” said Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton economics professor....

The law will also put
limits on high-deductible policies such as those chosen by Laurie Simons, 62,
and Mary McVey, 50—meaning they pay significant sums out of their own pockets
before their coverage kicks in.

Starting in January, new
policies must cap annual “out-of-pocket” costs, which include deductibles and
co-insurance payments, to about $6,350 for an individual, or $12,700 for a
family—amounts that could still be a stretch for many
consumers.

“There aren’t that many
Americans who have that kind of cash just sitting around,” said Karen Pollitz of
the Kaiser Family Foundation....”For the middle-class uninsured, it may
still be a struggle....

SANTA FE, N.M.
-- Over 165 citizens attended the evening session at City Hall tonight and
approximately 70 people provided public comment on the proposed ordinance [restricting]
large capacity ammunition feeding devices with a 2 to 1 majority against the
ordinance.

Agostini, testifying before the
House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said the
bureau’s 2013 budget of $541 million includes a one-time renovation expense for
its Washington
headquarters. He estimated the fiscal 2014 budget will be $497 million. He said
increased funding for CFPB programs will support system development and
increase staffing the Division of Supervision, Enforcement, and Fair Lending.

Agostini specified that the
planned staff increase is largely required to “handle an increasing volume of
consumer complaints.” He testified, “More than 40 percent of the growth in
staff over the next two fiscal years will support Supervision, Enforcement, and
Fair Lending activities, including the continued build-out of a regional
examination workforce.... The budget for personnel compensation and benefits
fund an expected 1,214 full-time equivalent employees in fiscal year 2013, and
1,545 in fiscal year 2014.”

He also testified that,
since the creation of the CFPB, it has handled more than 130,000 complaints
from around the country, and refunded $425 million to 6 million customers as a
result of enforcement actions....

For four years oil
companies, airlines and ground transportation industry groups have petitioned California for
exemptions from the state’s cap-and-trade greenhouse gas market, saying consumers
would take the hit through higher prices at the pump and in stores. And in
court they are still arguing that the state lacks the regulatory authority to
compel participation....

The transportation fuels
industry won a two-year delay in its participation in cap-and-trade....

Compliance is set to
begin in 2015, just five years before the program’s reduction targets are
supposed to be met....

Some market analysts say
it is not the cap-and-trade program itself, but rather the sustained lobbying
by the transportation fuels industry that could disrupt California’s economy and its ability to
regulate pollution equitably and efficiently.

‘The continued lobbying
from a number of oil companies to change the cap-and-trade provisions for 2015
and after could also bring sudden shifts in supply and demand outlook,’ said Emilie Mazzacurati,
managing director of Four Twenty Seven, a climate consulting firm in
Berkeley.

Just a few months after
its November launch, California’s
cap-and-trade program appears to be functioning as planned...

On May 16, 14,522,048
metric tons of carbon were traded. A single allowance
went for $14, up from $10.09 in November. There is also a market for allowances
extending to 2016, indicating that businesses are thinking ahead about their
emissions. Analysts, environmentalists and academics say rising prices indicate
that polluters and other traders trust that the cap-and-trade program will continue
to operate as planned.

Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and
Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley,
said the auction results — plus an array of other state climate change rules —
lend assurance that cap-and-trade will survive challenges, and emissions will
start to fall.

California has a “dense network of
thoughtful rules on energy and climate,” he said, including the low-carbon fuel
standard and land-use regulation designed to reduce vehicle emissions by
promoting transit-oriented development. That means cap-and-trade “is reinforced
in ways that should keep the sector on pace to emissions reductions.” ...

Washington has spent the past three years
obsessing about debt. While there were good reasons to worry about deficits and
debt three years ago, many of those reasons have dissipated. Three years ago,
the Congressional Budget Office projected that deficits would exceed 8 percent
of gross domestic product by 2023. Today, deficits are projected to be 3.5
percent of GDP in 2023 without the automatic “sequester” spending cuts; with
them, deficits will be even lower.

At the same time that
the budget picture has been improving, we have been missing the mark on the
broader economy. Unemployment is a full percentage point higher this year than
the CBO predicted it would be by now, while total economic output is 5 percent
lower.

Washington’s relentless focus on deficit
reduction has made it harder, not easier, to create good middle-class jobs and
boost economic growth. In a rational world, Washington would be able to work
simultaneously on bringing down the long-term debt and creating good jobs now.
But the past three years have proven that lawmakers are not very good at
walking and chewing gum at the same time. We’ve enacted nearly $4 trillion
worth of deficit reduction since 2010—when the sequester
is included—but few policies to help the economy grow....

Yes, the nation still
has a long-term deficit challenge. And yes, entitlement reform will have to be
part of the solution. But rebuilding a strong economy with a vibrant middle
class is an urgent problem today, not 10 years from now. Washington has been focused on deficits, not
growth. It’s time to shift that focus.

NeeraTanden is president of the Center for
American Progress. Michael Linden is the center’s managing
director for economic policy.

Hoping to cut medical
costs, employers are experimenting with a new way to pay for health care,
telling workers that their company health plan will pay only a fixed amount for
a given test or procedure, like a CT scan or knee replacement. Employees who
choose a doctor or hospital that charges more are responsible for paying the
additional amount themselves.

Although it is in the
early stages, the strategy is gaining in popularity and there is some evidence
that it has persuaded expensive hospitals to lower their prices.

In California, a large plan for public
employees has been especially aggressive in using the tactic, and the results
are being watched closely by employers and hospital systems elsewhere....

Overall costs for
operations under the program fell 19 percent in 2011, the program’s first year,
with the average amount it paid hospitals for a joint replacement falling to
$28,695, from $35,408, according to an analysis by WellPoint’s researchers that
was released Sunday at a health policy conference.

The study found no
impact on quality of care....

At the least, the California experiment
may suggest that the irrationality of pricing may be coming to an end. ‘‘Price
is the leading driver of health care cost growth,’’ said Suzanne Delbanco, the executive director for
Catalyst for Payment Reform, a group that aims to encourage employers and
health plans to change the way they pay for care.

The California plan has made it clear to the
hospitals that it was both aware of the unexplained variation in prices and
that it would no longer simply pay whatever a hospital charged the insurer, she
said. ‘‘That’s a very powerful signal,’’ she said.

President Obama is ready
to take one more shot at global warming with the last, least-popular, and
messiest tool he’s got left: regulations administered by the politically
besieged Environmental Protection Agency.

It won’t be popular, it
might not work, and it could jeopardize his pick to head EPA. But the reality
is that, three years after Congress killed a cap-and-trade bill, Obama is
running out of time. If he doesn’t finalize EPA rules controlling
greenhouse-gas emissions before he leaves the White House, a Republican
president, or a GOP-controlled Senate, could undo the rules and his
environmental legacy....

At issue is a pair of regulations
controlling greenhouse-gas emissions from new and existing power plants, the
latter of which account for nearly 40 percent of the country’s heat-trapping
emissions.... The rules covering existing plants could have the greatest
impact, both on cutting carbon emissions and raising the cost of electricity,
because coal is the cheapest, most prevalent, and dirtiest way to produce
electricity....

“The time will go very
quickly because regulations don’t move quickly through the process,” said Joe Kruger, who served as deputy associate
director for energy and climate change at the White House Council on Environmental
Quality during Obama’s first term. “It will be a bit of a time crunch to
get it done by the end of the Obama second term.”

Kruger, who now directs
energy and environmental policy at the BipartisanPolicyCenter, predicted the
administration will succeed because Obama is putting his own political capital
into the issue. “They will figure out one way or another how to get it done,”
he said....

WASHINGTON
- Automakers are coming under increasing pressure to sell zero-emission
vehicles to U.S. consumers
who have shown little interest in them, with more states following California’s lead in
setting sales targets.

Nine states, including New York and New Jersey,
have adopted versions of California’s
goal of having electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen-powered models reach 15
percent of its new-car purchases by 2025. Automakers face fines and potentially
restrictions on sales for not reaching the targets....

California’s
mandate, which accounts for about one-third of U.S. electric-vehicle sales, is
part of the state’s effort to reduce emissions from vehicles, power plants and
oil refineries. “Both a market push and market pull are needed, and they need
to be in sync,” said Roland Hwang, the San
Francisco-based transportation program director for the Natural Resources
Defense Council and a supporter of the California mandate. “We need both a
long-term, stable signal for automakers to produce electric cars and a robust,
growing consumer market.”

Sales won’t be helped if
reluctant automakers sandbag sales, he said.

“Who killed the electric
car, part three?” Hwang asked. “Some
automakers are more committed than others to the clean car market. And it may
surprise some that the industry doesn’t follow the past patterns. We now have
GM as one of the biggest champions of electrification and Honda as one of the
biggest skeptics.”

Blackbird Tavern, photographed June 21, 2013, has opened in the
former home of Casa Castillo, a popular Mexican restaurant that was forced out
of the space in 2001 by San Jose’s
Redevelopment Agency. (Sal Pizarro)

Ever since 2001, when
San Jose’s Redevelopment Agency evicted Marcelino
Castillo’s restaurant Casa Castillo from its longtime home on South First
Street, the ground-floor spot in the elegant Twohy
Building has been the kiss of death for restaurants.

Zyng
Asian Grill, Asqew Grill and Ruffled Feathers all
fell victim to the Curse of Casa Castillo over the next decade, opening with
fanfare and quietly closing for a multitude of reasons. Now Chris Esparza and Brendan Rawson, who produced a hit, hip
eatery with the Naglee Park Garage, are hoping to
break the curse with their new venture, the jazz-infused Blackbird Tavern.

And they’ve got at least
one thing going for them: The blessings of Castillo himself.

“He’s happy to see us
here,” Esparza said of Castillo, who won a $1.3 million settlement from the
city and later opened a new restaurant in South San Jose.
“I think he was happy it was a local moving in and that we were going to
approach this business like he did.”

What that means is a “neighborhood
restaurant” smack dab in an urban environment, where you can watch light-rail
trains go by every few minutes and are just steps from the Fairmont Hotel....

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)
— California is projected to face a shortage of as many as 17,000 doctors
within two years, a problem that is especially acute in rural areas and
minority communities.

One Democratic lawmaker
has proposed a package of bills intended to fill that provider gap by expanding
the health services that can be provided by nurse practitioners, optometrists
and pharmacists. Sen. Ed Hernandez of West Covina
says his bills would help California’s
doctor shortage as millions of new patients become eligible for health
insurance under the federal Affordable Care Act....

California has roughly 30,000 primary care
physicians for a state with more than 37 million residents. That ranks the
state 26th in the ratio of primary doctors to residents, according to the
Association of American Medical Colleges.

The problem is not so
much the overall number of doctors but how they are distributed throughout the
state, said Marian Mulkey,
director of health reform and public programs at the nonprofit California HealthCare Foundation, based in Oakland.

While the state’s more
affluent areas have an adequate number of doctors and other health providers,
other regions need more.

“Overall, in the
aggregate, California
doesn’t have as much of a worry about physician shortage as some states, but we
have big distribution issues, particularly in rural areas,” she said.

That’s not just a
shortage of primary care physicians but also specialists. Mulkey said a lack of diversity
among doctors and California’s history of low Medicaid reimbursement rates
further exacerbate the shortage in underserved regions....

Since the 1970s,
Medicare claims data has been off limits to the public, but a federal judge in Florida recently ruled
in favor of Dow Jones to allow public access to claims data. However, the data
is available only with a Freedom of Information Act request, and Wyden and
Grassley argue the data should be available at no charge on an easily
accessible website.

Wyden touted the bill
during a Finance Committee hearing Tuesday on hospital price transparency.
Those testifying at the hearing said price transparency is not enough in the
absence of good data on quality of care....

Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of
Catalyst for Payment Reform, said companies are making their employees pay
an increasingly larger share of insurance costs with high deductibles and
consumer-driven health plans, a trend she expects the Affordable Care Act’s
requirements to accelerate, so it makes sense to use consumers to drive
competition in the health care market, but consumers need price and quality
data to make good decisions.

Two of CPR’s members, CalPERS,
and Safeway, are testing reference pricing to engage consumers in making more
value-oriented selections of providers, and price transparency is the
foundation of those programs....

“There’s probably no
hotter topic than drug policy in the United States.”

That’s what Mt. Lebanon
Library Director Cynthia Richey said before introducing guest speaker Dr. Beau Kilmer at the library on June
13.

Kilmer, the co-director of RAND, a national nonprofit institution
that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and development,
spoke to about a dozen people at the library on the “hot topic” of drug policy
in the U.S. during a program
titled “Clearing the Smoke on Drug Policy in America.” ...

Kilmer, who earned his doctorate in public policy from HarvardUniversity,
is a professor at the PardeeRANDGraduateSchool
and is also under contract with the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy to generate the official estimates of marijuana consumption for the
country. Kilmer is also currently working with the state of Washington to help legislators there
understand the implications of marijuana legalization options....

Kilmer told the audience at the program that there is good news and
bad news as far as drugs are concerned. He said the
good news is that cocaine and crack cocaine use have gone down significantly in
the past five years.

“A lot of the heaviest
users are just aging out,” Kilmer
said. He added that in recent years, many companies are requiring drug tests in
order to be able to work. Kilmer said there has been a large reduction in the
total amount of cocaine trafficked in from other countries.

The bad news, Kilmer said, is that prescription drug
abuse has risen. He said national statistics show that between 2004 and 2008
the number of emergency room visits due to prescription drug overdose has
doubled. He said in 1999, about 4,000 people died from overdoses of
prescription drugs like Vicodin and Oxycontin. That number increased to 16,000 in 2010, Kilmer said.

“If you look at everyone
who died from prescription drugs or (drugs like) cocaine, more people are dying
of drug overdoses than traffic accidents,” Kilmer
said....

“CMS is sitting on so
much data; it’s a goldmine,” said Giovanni Colella,
CEO and co-founder of Castlight Health, before the
U.S. Senate Committee on Finance on Tuesday. ‘Making that data accessible will
help everyone better understand quality of care and cost of care.’

But data alone won’t
drive down healthcare costs. Colella joined TIME
contributing editor Steven Brill and two other
healthcare transparency leaders in testifying before the committee on high
prices and low transparency in healthcare....

Another approach
referenced by Dr. Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of Catalyst for Payment Reform,
was reference-based pricing. Under this design, payers set the price of a
particular service, and if a patient receives that service at a higher cost, he
must pay the additional costs. This approach is being used in hip and knee
surgeries by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Delbanco underscored the
important of both quality and cost data in guiding such plan design. “One of
today’s biggest shortcomings is the separation of price and quality
information,” she said.

She proposed that
quality measures by which providers are evaluated should be the ones where
there is the greatest disparity among providers, not just the ones that are
easiest to report or are least offensive to providers. “I think we have
probably too many (quality metrics) now and not enough that focus on exactly
those points where there’s the greatest opportunity for reducing harm and where
there’s the greatest variation in performance,’ she said. ‘We tend to measure
things that are easy to collect data on and that show very little difference
between providers.” ...

As you know, global
warming is a major issue currently. Fossil fuels like coal and oil are
gradually heating up the earth’s atmosphere, but thankfully we have better
alternatives....

A lesser-known source is
algae fuel. People have been growing algae in labs and have discovered that if
you get the oil out of algae, you can use it instead of gasoline. Some people
think that using electric cars is still dirty, but Laura Wisland, an energy analyst with Union of Concerned Scientists, says, “If you power
your car with electricity from clean, renewable sources like wind or solar
power, the electricity you use is virtually pollution free.”

Many countries are
fairly close to being completely green. For example, as of 2010, more than 47
percent of Sweden’s
electricity comes from renewable sources. As Wisland states, “Average
temperatures are increasing throughout the year,” indicating that global
warming is “happening faster than we think.” As you see, there is more to be
done, but better options are appearing....

Dr. Vietta
Louise Johnson and David Wiley Campt were married Friday evening at the MillenniumCenter,
an event space in Winston-Salem,
N.C....

The couple met at Princeton, from which they graduated.

The bride, 52, is an
orthopedic surgeon who was, until last November, the medical director of the
Wound Healing and Prevention Institute at Franciscan St. Margaret Health
hospital in Hammond, Ind. She received a master’s in health
policy and management and a medical degree from Harvard....

The groom, 51, is an
organizational consultant in Greensboro,
N.C., who works with foundations
and nonprofit organizations on race relations and leadership decisions. Until
July 2011, he was the deputy director of the Western
JusticeCenter in Pasadena, Calif.,
which offers conflict-resolution strategies to high schools and other
organizations. He received a master’s in
public policy and a Ph.D. in city
planning from the University of California, Berkeley....

The couple had seen each
other at various college reunions throughout the years and always made a point
to dance together. But when they met in October 2009 at the end of a conference
put on by Princeton and the Association of
Black Princeton Alumni, something changed. At night’s end, Mr. Campt suddenly shouted across the
dance floor to Dr. Johnson that he loved her and always had.

‘‘I was stunned,’’ said
Dr. Johnson, who divorced in 2008. She added, ‘‘I leaned back and asked David’s
best friend if David was drunk.’’

He was not. ‘‘I was
fueled not by liquor but by this great community feeling in the air,’’ Mr. Campt
said. ‘‘I was always attracted to her, but she seemed out of my league.
Finally, I just said: ‘Why not? We’re older now, why be shy about anything?’ ‘‘
...

Last December, at a 50th
birthday celebration for a close friend of hers in West Orange, N.J.,
Mr. Campt
proposed. Dr. Johnson, microphone in hand, playfully stalled for a brief moment
before saying yes. ‘‘I believe that all along, the universe had been conspiring
to keep us together,’’ he said.

... Growing up in the
late 1960s, the New Jersey native had access
to the musical riches of New York City.
With one sister employed at the Fillmore East, he caught many top rock, blues
and jazz artists and heard Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard. While
interested in jazz, like the vast majority of his peers, he was more drawn to
rock until he experienced a teenage epiphany listening to trumpeter Lee Morgan’s
classic 1964 Blue Note album “Search for the NewLand.”
...

On his latest album, a
masterly trio session on Capri with bassist
Lisle Atkinson and drummer Eliot Zigmund, “No One
New,” Breakstone delivers a program focusing on sizzling originals and an
exquisite version of Jimmy Rowles’ classic ballad “The
Peacocks.” The guitarist’s old-school musical virtues seem to be an ideal fit
for the reboot of Lou’s Village, the latest venue to sign on with San Jose Jazz for regular gigs designed
to bring the music into the community.

The original restaurant
served as an essential SouthBay entertainment hub for
decades after Lou Santoro opened the venue in 1946. The old spot closed in 2005
and reopened in the new WillowGlenTownCenter last October under
the auspices of Santoro’s grandsons Tim and Tom Muller (who is a jazz pianist
himself).

“Tom has played with
Kris Strom and other artists we consistently present,” says San Jose Jazz executive director Brendan Rawson.
“This wouldn’t happen without his passion. He designed the dining room in terms
of acoustics, and presenting jazz was always part of his hope for the new
incarnation of Lou’s Village.”

If you’ve looked at a
newspaper or news website in the last day or so, you most likely know that New
Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has decided to hold a special election in October
for Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat. You may also know that some people (read:
Republicans) are not too thrilled by this . There’s
also a chance you’ve seen this number: $24 million. According to the New Jersey
Office of Legislative Services, that’s about how much holding two special
elections (one primary, one general) will cost New Jersey....

But is there an upside
to the price tag? To state the obvious, the U.S. economy is still in a rough
patch. And although New Jersey’s
economy is growing, the state isn’t in the clear quite yet. So can putting $200
in the pockets of 26,168 poll workers; one time for the primary, and one time
for the general, give a stimulative jolt to the GardenState?

Tracy Gordon, a fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings
Institution, isn’t too willing to throw out the s-word. She notes that if
you look at New Jersey’s
gross state product for 2011 the last year for which data is available you see
that the cost of one special election makes up just .0025 percent. “It’s a drop
in the bucket in terms of the overall size of the economy,” Gordon said.

At the same time, Gordon notes that poll workers could
fit into the group of people who are otherwise income- and
credit-constrained and could use the $200 per electionand
may then send that money back into the state’s economy. And while the $200 may
not sound like much, it’s not so far out of line with the amount of money
typical of tax rebates.

“At various points we’ve
given people tax rebates of $500 and expected a big bang for the buck,” said Gordon. “But these poll workers are not
a very big part of the economy.” ...

The JeanTysonChildDevelopmentStudyCenter opened in August
and accommodates 140 from infancy through preschool.

Fayetteville, Ark. -- The Jean Tyson Child
Development Study Center at the University
of Arkansas is
approaching its one-year anniversary since opening in August, and Zara Niederman and Gina Vickery-Niederman want to start the second year by awarding
tuition assistance to U of A graduate students for the upcoming fall and spring
semesters.

Gina Vickery-Niederman is a U of A
doctoral student in environmental dynamics, and with her husband, Zara, through
3VOLVE Housing Inc., the Niedermans have established
the JeanTysonChildDevelopmentStudyCenter 3VOLVE Scholarship
Challenge: Quality Childcare for U of A Students.

“As a graduate student
and parent, I find it hard to fully describe the value of quality, on-campus
child care,” said Vickery-Niederman. “The benefits take place on many levels:
child development and career development, as well as supporting stronger
families and communities. This experience has moved us to contribute what we
can to bring this type of support to a more diverse range of families.”

The need-based
scholarships will benefit U of A graduate students with encouragement for
others to provide fee assistance as well. The purpose is to increase access to
quality, on-campus childcare; and to raise awareness of the need for affordable
childcare. An anonymous donor supported the scholarship through a matching grant,
which doubles the impact of the Niederman gift....

“We are grateful that
the Niedermans and 3VOLVE Housing chose to be leaders
in supporting the university’s graduate student community,” said Doug Walsh,
executive director for business and operations of the JeanTysonChildDevelopmentStudyCenter.
“They know the hurdles parents must overcome to complete their degrees, and
ensure their children are in a nurturing environment and receiving an
exceptional education. Thanks to the Niedermans, the
graduate students and their children are both better positioned to excel. As a
graduate student, Gina’s experiences
with the Jean Tyson Center led to the desire to create the scholarship to
ensure the child of at least one graduate student receives quality childcare
for a year.” ...

The public servants interviewed for this series
on sequestration share a fierce commitment to serve those in
need.

The hopefulness and
positivity of each ... in the face of one more budget cut, is remarkable,
especially as their agencies scramble to shield their clients from the worst
pain of sequestration....

A collaboration between
the Housing Authority and Department of Human Services, Oakland PATH Re-housing
Initiative, OPRI, has been forced to tell 40 people that “there is no program for
them, at least for now,” according to Human
Services Interim Director Sara Bedford

Oakland Human Services
is receiving $600,000 less due to sequestration, on top of years of
insufficient funding.

“We haven’t seen an
increase in federal grant money for years,” Bedford
said. “For five years, they have been eroding the system because costs have
been going up.” ...

... Detroit
is a devastatingly poor, mostly black, increasingly abandoned island in the
midst of a sea of comparative affluence that’s mostly white. Its suburbs are
among the richest in the nation. OaklandCounty, for example, is the fourth
wealthiest county in the United
States, of counties with a million or more
residents.... The median household in Birmingham,
Michigan, just across the border that
delineates the city of Detroit, earned more than
$94,000 last year; in nearby Bloomfield Hills—still within the Detroit metropolitan area—the
median was more than $150,000.

The median household income within the city of Detroit is around $26,000,
and unemployment is staggeringly high. One out of 3 residents is in poverty;
more than half of all children in the city are impoverished. Between 2000 and
2010, Detroit
lost a quarter of its population as the middle-class and whites fled to the
suburbs. That left it with depressed property values, abandoned neighborhoods,
empty buildings, lousy schools, high crime, and a dramatically-shrinking tax
base. More than half of its parks have closed in the last five years. Forty
percent of its streetlights don’t work.

In other words, much in modern America depends on where you draw
boundaries, and who’s inside and who’s outside. Who is
included in the social contract? If “Detroit” is
defined as the larger metropolitan area that includes its suburbs, “Detroit” has enough money
to provide all its residents with adequate if not good public services, without
falling into bankruptcy. Politically, it would come down to a question of
whether the more affluent areas of this “Detroit”
were willing to subsidize the poor inner-city through their tax dollars, and
help it rebound. That’s an awkward question that the more affluent areas would
probably rather not have to face....

It’s roughly analogous to a Wall Street bank
drawing a boundary around its bad assets, selling them off at a fire-sale
price, and writing off the loss. Only here we’re dealing with human beings
rather than financial capital. And the upcoming fire sale will likely result in
even worse municipal services, lousier schools, and more crime for those left
behind in the city of Detroit.
In an era of widening inequality, this is how wealthier Americans are quietly
writing off the poor.

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration....
His new film, “Inequality for All,” will be out September 27.

With revenue surging to record levels and riders
flocking to standing-room only trains, BART would seem like an unlikely place for
a bitter showdown over employee pay hikes as workers threaten another strike in
two weeks.

But a closer look at the agency’s financial data
by this newspaper shows a fast-growing problem is threatening the future growth
of the Bay Area’s biggest train line: Half of the $69 million in new revenue
BART raked in since 2010 has gone toward the rising cost of employee health
care and pensions....

While BART’s operating
revenues climbed 11.5 percent in the last three years, its health care and
pension costs rose nearly 35 percent....

Agency officials on Monday showed off a mock-up
of future train cars they say will provide a cleaner, more reliable ride. But
they say they can afford them only by keeping overall employee compensation the
same over the next five years....

Before state mediators issued a gag order nearly
three weeks ago, BART had offered an 8 percent pay hike that would be balanced
out by increases to benefit contributions, while unions wanted a 20 percent wage
bump with a very slight increase to benefit contributions.

“It seems like the large majority of the public
is upset with the unions for being rigid,” said Sarah Anzia, assistant professor of public
policy at UC Berkeley. She said a lot of people realized that “compared to
what I contribute toward my retirement or health insurance, this is nothing.” ...

... [Wesley] Clark, who chairs a Canadian energy
company called Envidity, a company wanting to explore
Kosovo’s underground coal deposits, is claiming, like [the World Bank’s
president Dr. Jim Yong Kim], that coal is the answer to Kosovo’s economic
problems and energy security....

The answer, instead, is in energy efficiency,
which is hardly sexy from an industry perspective but absolutely necessary for
Kosovo. Today, Kosovo is wasting 30 percent of its energy, according to
official data, because sufficient energy efficiency programs have not been
instituted. Add to that number another 37 percent from electricity losses (17
percent results from outdated grids and technical deficiencies, the rest from
commercial losses).

Beyond energy efficiency, the WorldBank’s former “Clean Energy Czar,” Daniel Kammen,
suggests that Kosovo’s renewable energy sector could provide 34 percent of the
country’s energy demand by 2025, provide 60 percent more jobs (than a stay at
the status quo) and provide savings between 5 and 50 percent (using a scenario
that even includes a new power plant). In sum, there is no need for a new
coal-fired power plant. The answer is in energy efficiency and renewable
energy....

Nearly 30,000 California prisoners are on hunger strike to
protest various abuses, including the extensive use of solitary confinement.
This strike is the latest reflection of just how broken the state’s prison system
is. And in turn, the problems in California
showcase the myriad messes that increasingly define American crime-control
policy.

The disastrous state of California prisons two years ago compelled
the federal courts to intervene. The Court ruled that the overcrowding had
become so dire that it violated the Eighth Amendment, upholding a lower court
order that the prison population be reduced....

... The current prison situation in California is a perfect
storm created by two policies that have dominated recent American political
life: mass incarceration and anti-tax mania.

In their new book Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, Steven Raphael and Michael A. Stoll identify several key policy
changes that have spawned a prison population far larger than that of any other
liberal democracy: limiting judicial discretion by setting determinate
sentences, making it much more difficult for prisoners to qualify for parole,
an increasing number of mandatory minimum sentences, and laws that impose much
harsher sentences for repeat offenders. California
is particularly notorious for the latter, having passed a “three strikes and
you’re out” initiative that was applied to give a life sentence to a person
convicted of stealing three golf clubs....

The 19 firefighters who died battling a huge
wildfire near Prescott, Ariz., presumably were motivated by
something other than rational self-interest. Like the first responders to 9/11
and other emergencies, and members of the armed forces, those firefighters put
themselves in harm’s way (or chose a job that did so) because they wanted to
serve.

Economics and much of public policy and
political strategy assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the
definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for yourself and
that other values — service, duty, allegiance to others, morality and shared
ideals — are either irrelevant or negligible.

Ayn Rand, the
philosophical guru of modern conservatism, popularized this view of human
nature. In her world, selfishness is the only honest and justifiable motive. By
looking out for No. 1, we accomplish everything that’s necessary. Economist
Milton Friedman extended the logic: The magic of the marketplace can be relied
on to allocate resources to their highest and best uses. Anything “public” is
suspect....

When arguing against paying their fair share of
taxes, some wealthy Americans claim “it’s my money.” They forget it’s their
nation, too. And unless they pay their fair share of taxes, America can’t meet the basic needs
of our people. True patriotism means paying for America.

Most human beings want to be part of something
larger than themselves. They crave moral purpose and
social solidarity.

If we overlook this, we fail to understand the means
and meaning of social progress.

The University
of California generated a
national buzz on Friday with the surprising announcement that Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano—a political heavyweight, rather than a prominent
academic—would be its next leader.

Instead of becoming the next attorney general or
Supreme Court justice, as many had speculated, Napolitano plans to come west to
make history as UC’s first female president....

Napolitano’s nomination comes as the prized
research university system looks for political and financial support after
losing about $1 billion in state funding during the economic downturn. Some
observers say the former Arizona governor
could enjoy more credibility with California’s
lawmakers—and Californians—than an academic, who might be seen as disconnected
from realities of the day.

With someone of Napolitano’s stature and
experience in the room, lawmakers “start from the presumption that this is a
person who understands our problems,” said Henry
Brady, dean of UC Berkeley’s GoldmanSchool of Public Policy....

Students at
the University of
Minnesota held a rally
last year protesting the profiling that may have led to the shooting death of
teenager Trayvon Martin. (Fibonacci
Blue / Flickr)

The word “race” hasn’t been mentioned much in
the trial of George Zimmerman, the man accused of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year. But the issue of racial profiling
is an elephant in the courtroom. This hour we’ll talk to subjects of a recent
profiling incident in Ohio,
and get an expert perspective on why prejudice won’t let go.

Guests

- Jo Brandon-Jones and Xzavier
Brandon, residents of New-Albany,
Ohio

- Michael Higginbotham, Professor of Law - University of Baltimore, author of Ghosts of Jim Crow

- Jack Glaser,
Associate Professor of Public Policy - University
of California, Berkeley

PROF.
GLASER:...
One of the major findings was that even if police targeted groups offending at
substantially higher rate, the long term benefits of profiling in terms of capturing
criminals or deterring crime were very modest and even ironic if it caused disproportionate
arrests.The troubling finding is,
regardless of offending rates—whether whites commit more crimes or blacks
commit more crimes—if police profile ... it will create disproportion in the criminal
justice system, that is disproportionate to the difference
in offense... The [targeted] offending
groups will be incarcerated at a higher rate than their relative rates of
offending, so it will create the disparities that are being used to justify it
in the first place....

The profiling itself is causing people to be
caught at a higher rate than they would be if police are just looking for
people engaging in suspicious behavior, because as soon as they use some kind
of mental short-cut, like a racial stereotype, they get away from the valuable information
of people’s actual behavior, so their judgment becomes less accurate....

A basic economic principle is government ought
to tax what we want to discourage, and not tax what we want to encourage.

For example, if we want less carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, we should tax carbon polluters. On the other hand, if we want
more students from lower-income families to be able to afford college, we
shouldn’t put a tax on student loans.

Earlier this year the Republican-led House
passed a bill pegging student-loan interest rates to the yield on the 10-year
Treasury note, plus 2.5 percentage points. “I have very little tolerance for
people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of
debt because there’s no reason for that,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the
co-sponsor of the GOP bill, said.

Republicans estimate this will bring in around
$3.7 billion of extra revenue, which will help pay down the federal debt....

Meanwhile, a growing number of Republicans have
signed a pledge – sponsored by the multi-billionaire Koch brothers — to oppose
any climate-change legislation that might raise government revenues by taxing
polluters....

Why are Republicans willing to impose a tax on
students and not on polluters? Don’t look for high principle....

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California atBerkeley
....

Jobs are returning with depressing slowness, and
most of the new jobs pay less than the jobs that were lost in the Great
Recession. Economic determinists assume that globalization and technological advancement
necessarily condemn a large portion of the American workforce to
underemployment and stagnant wages while rewarding those with the best
educations and connections with ever-higher wages and wealth.

Many on the right of the political spectrum say
we should accept this outcome because we mustn’t interfere with the free
market. Some on the left say we should withdraw from global trade; a few want
us to become neo-Luddites and stop using labor-saving technologies.

Both sides are wrong. Other nations subject to
the same forces of globalization and rapid technological change are doing far
better for their average workers....

What would a national strategy designed to
increase jobs and wages look like?

For starters, it would focus on raising the
productivity of all Americans through better education — including
early-childhood education and near-free higher education.

This would require a revolution in how we finance
public education. It’s insane that half of K-12 budgets across America
still come from local property taxes, for example, given that we’re segregating
geographically by income.

Moreover, it makes no sense to rely on student
debt to finance the higher education of young people from middle- and
lower-income families. This has resulted in a mountain of debt that can’t or
won’t be paid off. And it falsely assumes that higher education is a private
investment rather than a public good....

Congress is in an uproar over the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.

In the past half-decade, mostly because of the
recession, enrollment grew to 21.1 million U.S. households—encompassing
one-seventh of the population when you include children and other dependents—at
a cost of $78 billion in fiscal 2011, according to the Department of
Agriculture.

House Republicans want to cut SNAP by at least
$20 billion over the next decade, and Democrats want to preserve it pretty much
as is. The dispute sent the 2013 farm bill—legislation in which SNAP has
traditionally been twinned with subsidies for farmers—down to an unexpected
defeat last month.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Abolish food
stamps, on one condition: Congress would have to distribute the SNAP budget
among other programs for the poor, for which many SNAP recipients also qualify....

The current flap is about work incentives. Some
in the GOP argue that rising SNAP enrollment is re-creating the dependency that
was supposed to have been abolished by welfare reform in 1996. The House passed
an amendment by Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., last
week that would let states impose welfare-reform-like work requirements on SNAP—and
keep half the money they save.

Democrats understandably recoiled at a measure
that gave states an incentive to kick people off the rolls. It did seem like
overkill for a program in which 30.5 percent of recipient households in fiscal
2011 had earned income, according to USDA data—and an additional 24.6 percent
of households consist of elderly and disabled individuals living alone. They
are not expected to work.

Still, what little systematic research has been done
suggests that food stamps exert “modest” downward pressure on labor supply, as economist Hilary Hoynes
of the University of California at Davis
put it in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. This mostly
shows up as a reduction in the number of hours single parents spend working, Hoynes found....

The Great Recession has not been a great
vacation. Four years since the recovery officially began,
many people are still unemployed not because they don’t want to work, but
because, with three job-seekers for every job opening, they can’t find any
work. And they are trying to find work. Indeed, a new paper by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and a Ph.D.
candidate at NortheasternUniversity, shows that
unemployment insurance hasn’t otherwise made the unemployed less likely to take
a job. If anything, it’s made them more likely to keep looking....

They can’t even get interviews. As Ghayad showed before in a field experiment, employers
largely ignore the resumes of people who have been out of work for six months
or longer. Firms assume there must be something wrong with people who have
unemployed that long, and don’t want to spend time finding out what it is, not
when they have a stack full of resumes to get through. But the long-term
unemployed have kept looking, at least in part because of benefits. Jesse Rothstein, a professor of economics at
the University of California-Berkeley, found that extended unemployment
benefits have increased unemployment by between 0.1 and 0.5 percentage points,
but at least half of this increase came from fewer long-term unemployed
dropping out of the labor force. In other words, people who would have
otherwise given up looking for work didn’t, because they had to keep looking to
qualify for benefits. A recent paper by Henry Farber of Princeton
and Robert Valletta of the San Francisco Fed found the same: Unemployment
benefits—even long-term unemployment benefits—encourage the jobless to keep
looking for work....

Robert Reich,
one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at
the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.
He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of
labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten
most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13
books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;”
“The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his
newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” ...